"On September 10, nearly 30,000 Chicago teachers went on strike for the first time in 25 years. This was no mere breakdown in negotiations over wages or healthcare contributions. At issue, as many have noted, was the fundamental direction of public education. The Chicago teachers asserted themselves as the first institutional force to combat what’s often called the “business model” of education reform.

"Meanwhile, in Detroit, students and teachers returned to dramatically altered schools. Over the summer, Roy Roberts, the schools’ “emergency financial manager,” had unilaterally imposed a contract on the city’s teacher union allowing elementary school class sizes to jump from 25 to 40 students and high school classes to 61 students. These class size reforms were coupled with a ten percent pay cut for Detroit teachers.

"While Detroit’s example is extreme, increased workloads for decreased pay are what teachers around the country — including in Chicago— are experiencing to varying degrees as the business model of education reform gains traction with policy-makers. But stretching workers past their breaking point and increasing hours while gutting compensation is nothing new. The business model of education reform is an extension of a process called lean production that transformed the U.S. private sector in the 1980s and 90s. In education, just as in heavy manufacturing, the greatest damage done by lean production is not done at the bargaining table, but in the destruction of teachers’ working (and students’ learning) conditions."

Jim Lerman's insight:

An infrequently encountered view on the current state of affairs in schools.

Introducing this work

For the purposes of this Scoop.it site, the history of human interaction with information may be divided into 4 eras. The first (spoken) era ended with the invention of writing around 3000-4000 BC. The second era ended with the invention of the printing press in 1440. The third era ended, and the fourth began, with the invention of the Internet (depending how one defines its operational beginning) somewhere between 1969 and 1982. We now exist early, but decidedly, in the fourth era.

All readers may not agree with this interpretation of the history of information, especially with the division and numbering of the eras. That is not the main point. Rather, it is that humankind is presently existing in an era distinctly different from the one that preceded it -- that in fact, this new era is accompanied with, and characterized by, a new - and quite different - information landscape. This new Internet information landscape will challenge, disrupt, and overpower the print-oriented one that came before it. It will not completely obliterate that which preceded it, but it will render it to a subsidiary, rather than primary, level of influence.

Just as the printing press altered humanity's relationship with information, thereby resulting in massive restructuring of political, religious, economic, social, educational, cultural, scientific, and other realms of life; so too will the Internet occasion analogous transformations in the corresponding universe of present and future human activity.

This site will concern itself primarily with how K-20 education in the US, and the people who comprise its constituencies, may be affected by this transformative movement from one era to the next. All ideas considered here appear, to me at least, to impact the learning enterprise in some way. Accordingly, this work looks at the present and the future through a lens that is predominantly, but far from entirely, a digital one. -JL

Opinions expressed, scooped, or copied in this Scoop.it topic are my choice, and are in no way to be connected with my employer.

"With a dramatically increasing number of both traditional and non-traditional students seeking post-secondary education, student retention and post-grad outcomes continue to be an increasingly important topic for both colleges and universities.

"The following are five fundamental ways to promote student success within colleges and universities:"

Free registration with eCampus News may be required to read this article.

Companies cannot hire fast enough. Glassdoor, an employment site, lists more than 7,300 openings for software engineers, ahead of job openings for nurses, who are chronically in short supply. For the smaller category of data scientists, there are more than 1,200 job openings. Demand is highest in San Francisco. Nationally, the average base salary for software engineers is $100,000, and $112,000 for data scientists.

"As the official blog of the U.S. Department of Education, Homeroom addresses dozens of issues with multiple posts every week. Some of the posts are primarily text-based, others lean heavily on well-developed graphs, charts, and other graphics, and still others include videos about programs, teachers, students, and communities. Homeroom can be scouted via an efficient search function. Readers may also like to peruse the offerings by scrolling through the several dozen categories, which cover College Completion, Success Stories, Headlines, Interviews, and many others. Recent stories have included a graphically oriented narrative about the progress of the Elementary and Secondary Act, and an educator's account of her time at Edcamp, a conference that brings together teachers from around the nation to discuss problems and solutions in today's educational environments."

Late this spring, the publisher Spiegel & Grau sent out advance copies of a new book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a slim volume of 176 pages called Between the World and Me. “Here is what I would like for you to know,” Coates writes in the book, addressed to his 14-year-old son. “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”

The only endorsement he had wanted was the novelist Toni Morrison’s. Neither he nor his editor, Christopher Jackson, knew Morrison, but they managed to get the galleys into her hands. Weeks later, Morrison’s assistant sent Jackson an email with her reaction: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died,” Morrison had written. “Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.” Baldwin died 28 years ago. Jackson forwarded the note to Coates, who sent back a one-word email: “Man.”

Jim Lerman's insight:

For those new to or only somewhat aware of Coates, this excellent article provides a rich introduction to the man and his ideas.

With support from Vulcan Inc, a Paul Allen company, Getting Smart conducted a series of expert interviews with education and philanthropy leaders, and led a design workshop, to identify and vet impact investment strategies in U.S. K-12 education. This resulting report outlines opportunities where organizations can participate in making significant shifts in the American education landscape, ultimately improving student outcomes.

Through our research and interviews, approximately four dozen impact opportunities were identified in the following 10 categories and are described within the report:

"Fundamental to competency-based learning and any attempt to personalize is mastery tracking, fed by formative assessment. In Formative Assessment to Initiate Learning, we touch on the idea that formative assessment is an ideal starting point on the path to personalization. Next, we dive into why using these results to track mastery is so important....

"Realistically, 5% – 10% a typical day is spent on instruction that is targeted. What if we flip that so that learning at the right level in the right the way occupies the majority of the day? Then we optimize customization, increase productivity, maximize motivation, boost persistence — all while radically improving achievement."

The police were on strike, yet we were still walking through the streets of Tembisa. It was the middle of July, but it wasn’t hot. We were in the southern hemisphere after all, and Africa is an enormous continent whose western stereotypes were consistently being shattered during our visit.

This was in 2006, when I took my first trip to the South African township, Tembisa (right outside of Johannesburg). I could list many different reasons of why I went on this trip. I enjoyed traveling. I had been a part of mission work before in Guatemala, Europe, and in the US. My wife (fiance at the time) was going with me as well. So were my brothers and sister.

All of these reasons would make sense of why we went to South Africa in the middle of summer, but they aren’t the real reason. My wife and I went to Tembisa because my Dad was extremely passionate about this cause. We could see how passionate he was in the way he talked about Africa and the people in Tembisa. My dad is a Pastor, and the year prior he had led a small team to Swaziland (a small country landlocked inside of South Africa) and had came back to the US on fire. Our group was headed to South Africa to learn from the people there, help run a huge kids camp, and volunteer at an AIDS clinic and orphanage.

Although we spent a lot of time learning about the culture and people of South Africa, nothing could prepare me for this experience. It changed my life in so many different ways. After a 7 hour flight to Paris, and a 11 hour flight to Johannesburg, our plane touched down and we headed towards an adventure I’d never forget.

During our conversation, Dr. Beach identified what I consider to be one of the most important educational innovations that digital texts bring to the classroom, namely their dialogic nature. While print texts may inspire dialogue, they exist as static, fixed entities offering one-way communication. Digital texts, on the other hand, can exist in a state of collaboration and change as users create, remix, mash up, or annotate.

More than any other aspect of digital texts, this sense of malleability is what I find most exciting as an educator because it helps us expand the definition of what constitutes writing and it reminds us that writing, just like all forms of creation, is a social practice in conversation with others in the world around us.

"Feeling hurt? Want to run to the hills? Stick on some metal - aggressive music helps increase positive emotions!Read the latest recommendation by Gerald Zamponi from the Neuroscience Faculty, at F1000Prime."

"Are you interested in integrating media making into your classroom? Making media, such as videos, narrated slideshows and online maps, can be an engaging way for students to demonstrate knowledge and build critical thinking skills. Find instructions, videos, worksheets and rubrics for implementing media-making projects with students. We also have self-paced professional development courses that you can take to learn media production!"

It’s no longer a given that if a child spends twelve years in school, he or she will learn enough to succeed in higher education or a career. To address this issue, some educators are taking bold measures to help students. Traditionally, classes move forward, covering the curriculum according to schedule. Students are taught the same materials at the same pace. If a student fails to learn a skill, he or she accepts that result and moves on to the next topic with the rest of the class.

Competency-based learning, on the other hand, insists on mastery of subjects and provides students the time to learn; the students are not marched past failure. There are challenges to this methodology as well, but it is slowly gaining acceptance and has been around long enough to develop some best practices. School districts that have seen success with this model carefully laid the groundwork for this fundamental change away from a traditional model of education. They also designed the infrastructure that supports it and learned some big lessons during implementation.

Education is a pretty hot-button issue for so many people out there. The issues in education are numerous and varied, and interestingly, many people find themselves feeling pretty strongly about one or two issues, and could take or leave many of the others. So whether special needs students, public funding, gender equality in education, or something else is ‘your’ issue, you can at least understand that many facets of education get people fired up.

"Below are six TED Talks that each address different aspects of education. You may look at some of the titles and think “that’s not ‘my’ issue”, but each one carries an important message and is worth the few minutes it will take to watch. These talks will both get you thinking about different issues, and will make you proud, angry, sad, excited, and inspired all at the same time."

What do personal computers, cell phones, and digital cameras have in common? They all started on the fringes. Then they hit a tipping point and, suddenly, they were everywhere.

This past year, I believe “open curriculum” — or curriculum that is free and adaptable — hit a similar tipping point in K-12 education. For the first time, more school districts chose an open curriculum over work developed by traditional publishers, like Pearson.

"Cities around the world run into a range of burdensome difficulties, from dwelling deficits to infrastructure problems to inefficient services to environmental pollution. The field of Urban Engineering attempts to address these complications with cost-effective and implementable strategies. This open access book outlines solutions related to urban automation, geographic information systems (GIS), monitoring and management of urban noise, floods, transportation, and many other topics. Each chapter of the book is available for individual download and covers a distinct topic. For instance, Chapter 3 focuses on "Experiences with the Ubranisation of Slums: Management and Intervention Models," while Chapter 10 looks at "Urban Flood Control, Simulation and Management - An Integrated Approach." For readers interested in understanding more about Urban Engineering, this freely accessible online book will provide a thorough introduction."

For the past century, the job was the way we redistributed wealth and protected workers from the negative aspects of early capitalism. As the knowledge economy disappears, we need to re-think our concepts of work, income, employment, and most importantly education. If we do not find ways to help citizens lead productive lives, our society will face increasing destabilization. This is a challenge for government, as our institutions are premised on many assumptions that are no longer valid. Changing the worldview of politicians, public servants, and citizens will be a key part of addressing the issue of wealth redistribution. Old mental models will not help us much.

Consider that almost all of our institutions and many of our laws are based on the notion of the job as the normal mode of working life. Schools prepare us for jobs. Politicians campaign on job creation. Labour laws are based on the employer-employee relationship. What happens when having a job is not the norm? In the USA today, half of all jobs are at a high risk of automation. But no society can afford to leave half of the workforce behind as it shifts to a creative economy. We have not had to deal with a problem of this scale before

Jim Lerman's insight:

I have lately encountered the work of Paul Mason, an economics-focused public intellectual based in the U.K. His latest book, "Is Capitalism Dead?" will be released at the end of July.

It seems to me that Mason has unusually acute perception regarding the direction of the modern world economy and yet I'm finding it quite a challenge to comprehend clearly and fully what he is saying.

Jarche, on the other hand, seems to be reading (and probably listening to) Mason closely (including, I am confident, a goodly number of other thinkers). Jarche's blog posts are helping me to understand Mason with greater clarity.

If you are trying to keep up with the direction and meaning of world events, particularly in relation to organizational, social, and work life, then Jarche is certainly someone who can function as a very helpful guide. At least, he's doing that for me.

People can learn a lot in college, and many do. But which college matters much less than everyone assumes. As Mr. Pascarella and Mr. Terenzini explain, the real differences exist at the departmental level, or within the classrooms of individual professors, who teach with a great deal of autonomy under the principles of academic freedom. The illusory university pretends that all professors are guided by a shared sense of educational excellence specific to their institution. In truth, as the former University of California president Clark Kerr observed long ago, professors are “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”

The problem for students is that it is all but impossible to know ahead of time which part of the disunified university is which. Consumers of higher education have been taught that their main choice lies between whole institutions that are qualitatively different from one another. Because this is wrong, the higher education market often fails, which is probably one reason that a third of students who enroll in four-year colleges transfer or drop out within three years.

In order to truly personalize the learning environment for students, teachers need to have a genuine and comprehensive understanding of their students. This means knowing their academic strengths and weakness as part of a complete learner profile that gives a holistic view of each student. However, the academic strengths and weaknesses is not something that can be monitored a couple times of year. The assessment process should be embedded within each lesson and used as tool for immediate and consistent feedback.

The Difference Between Formative Assessment and Summative Assessment

"When it comes to assessing student knowledge, we have traditionally followed a model in which we teach and then assess. In this situation, teachers, students, and parents identify what has been learned only after the assessment has been completed (and graded). An example this type of summative assessment would be an end of unit exam. As we move towards more student centered and personalized learning environments, it is essential that we go beyond assessing to determine knowledge and move into assessing as part of the learning process. This formative assessment is embedded within the lesson and gives teachers and students an immediate feedback loop that enhances learning."

One-in-three parents say they have had concerns or questions about their child’s technology use in the last year.

Previous research about teenagers and technology shows that parents of teens are both supportive and wary of their child’s use of the internet, social media, and cell phones.22 Many also take an active role in monitoring their teen’s online behavior and engaging in conversations about what is and is not appropriate to share online.23

In this survey, 33% of parents24 said they have had concerns or questions about their child’s technology use in the past 12 months. Mothers and fathers are equally likely to have had concerns and questions. Parents who have children over the age of 5 are significantly more likely than parents who only have children under age 5 to say they have had questions or concerns of this type over the past year (36% vs. 21%).

AFT locals are teaming up with Jobs with Justice and the Student Labor Action Project to offer online guidance, practical workshops, clinics and trainings that help people pay off their student loan debt.

"There's a lot we can do to have a debt-free future," says Huang, especially for individuals. There's public service loan forgiveness, for starters—a program that erases student loan debt after 10 years of qualifying, on-time payments for people working jobs in public education, public health, emergency services, legal services, government organizations and some nonprofits. But it's underutilized and underpublicized. In fact, of the 33 million people who are eligible for student debt forgiveness, just 222,387 have enrolled."

"In our work, we therefore aimed at creating an interactive visualization that can be used by anyone. As a first case, we chose to visualize the field of educational technology, as it represents a highly dynamic and interdisciplinary research field. As described in a recently published paper in the Journal of Informetrics (Kraker et al 2015), the visualization is based on a novel data source – the online reference management software Mendeley. The articles for the visualization were selected from Mendeley’s research catalog which is crowd-sourced from over 2.5 million users from around the world and offers structured access to more than a 100 million papers.

"The resulting knowledge domain visualization can be seen below {above, in this Scoop -JL}. The blue bubbles represent the main areas in the field. The size of the bubbles signifies the number of readers of publications in that area. The closer two areas are in the visualization, the closer they are subject-wise. An interactive version is also available; once you click on a bubble, you are presented with popular papers in that area. The dropdown on the right displays the same data in list form. Just go to Mendeley Labs (http://labs.mendeley.com/headstart) and try it for yourself! The source code is available on github: http://github.com/pkraker/Headstart"

Recommendations of the best research articles in biology and medicine from a faculty of global experts.F1000Prime filters the literature and highlights top articles as recommended by our faculty of ~6,000 expert scientists and clinical researchers, covering over 40 disciplines. Articles are rated and the faculty provide commentaries to explain why they recommend each article.

F1000Journal Clubs, an integral part of F1000Prime, encourages and facilitates scientists to discuss articles and share their conclusions.

Immediate & Transparent Publishing.F1000Research is an open science publishing platform for life scientists that offers immediate open access publication, transparent post-publication peer review by invited referees, and full data deposition and sharing. F1000Research accepts all scientifically sound articles, including single findings, case reports, protocols, replications, null/negative results, and more traditional articles.

Perhaps one of the most common questions teachers hear from students who struggle with math is, “When will I ever need this in the real world?” Concepts educators are covering can often feel archaic and remote from the things students care about in their immediate lives. But when educators think creatively about helping students see the applications of math in the real world, it provides a unique point of entry and interest into a subject that many kids may dislike.

Teachers at the public magnet school Science Leadership Academy use a project-based inquiry model of teaching in an effort to connect all subjects to students’ lives. Examining social justice issues by the numbers has proven to be one strong way teachers can connect student passions to math.

In one project, groups of three or four students were responsible for a written mathematical analysis of their topic, two visual representations of the data, an engaging public service announcement video explaining the data and a list of recommendations for how the issue could be addressed.

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